Synopsis: A woman employed as a website content moderator comes across a series of violent videos reproducing death scenes from a film.
Stars: Barbie Ferreira, Dacre Montgomery, Josie Totah, Aaron Holliday, Jermaine Fowler, Charli XCX
Director: Daniel Goldhaber
Rated: R
Running Length: 98 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Faces of Death is smarter and more polished than its troubled production history suggests, delivering a sharp commentary on digital desensitization that brings out something feral in Barbie Ferreira, even when the third act retreats to safer ground.
Review:
I was a horror kid. An “all sections” kind of video store browser, honestly. The type who found himself watching Carnal Knowledge around age ten and understanding exactly none of it. But horror was the aisle I lived in. The forbidden covers promised creatures and carnage beyond what my parents would have approved of. Still, there were titles I called “top shelf,” and not because of their quality. These were the ones behind the counter, requiring a different set of rules to rent. The Faces of Death films and their knockoffs. Those covers promised real death, real torture, real unpleasantness. I never gravitated toward them. I preferred to lose myself in the fantasy of film. So hearing about a new Faces of Death unnerved me from the jump.
The Content You Can’t Unsee
Directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written with Isa Mazzei (Cam), Faces of Death (2026) is not a remake in the traditional sense. It’s a narrative horror film that uses the 1978 exploitation curio as a springboard. The story it tells is far more relevant: the internet’s insatiable hunger for human suffering and the invisible workforce paid to stare into that void.
Margot (Barbie Ferreira, Nope) works as a content moderator for Kino, a TikTok-style video platform. Her job is to decide, clip by clip, what stays and what gets flagged. She’s haunted by a past brush with viral infamy, a trauma that drove her into bleak corporate purgatory. When a channel begins uploading videos that recreate murders from the original Faces of Death, Margot has to decide: elaborate fiction or something happening in real time? And if it’s real, can she use the internet as a weapon to find the killer and detect his next victim?
Fair warning: the film incorporates real footage of people being hurt, maimed, and worse. Certain sequences from the 1978 original appear in brief flashes. One infamously cruel scene involving a monkey and a hammer, among the rare moments in those films that was sickeningly real, is shown. Brief, but not brief enough to spare you. That this Faces of Death made it past the MPAA without an NC-17 is a surprise. How disturbing is it? If it means anything, I don’t normally look away during horror films. I looked away several times here.
Ferreira Finds the Nerve
In everything she has appeared in, Ferreira radiates as the relatable American everywoman. After a beautiful, criminally underseen turn in 2025’s Bob Trevino Likes It, she gives another strong, convincing performance in Faces of Death. Margot is troubled by her past, dedicated to atoning for it, and unwilling to sit by while anyone is exploited. She’s not the morality police, though. She just knows right from wrong and demands accountability.
The one thing consistent with Ferreira is that she can get expressive fast. She almost oversells emotion to an uncomfortable extreme. Sometimes that works for the character. Other times it feels like a take the director forgot to adjust. Ferreira has undergone a striking personal transformation since filming wrapped in 2023. Audiences tracking her recent press appearances may find it disorienting to see her looking so different onscreen. None of that changes the work, which is committed and frequently fearless.
The Killer and the Supporting Cast
Dacre Montgomery (Dead Man’s Wire) is scary good as Arthur, a serial killer with cunning smarts and chilling control. He has a goal. That makes him extra dangerous. He’s crossing items off a list, which means he’s been planning for a long time. Occasionally, the performance tips into clownish territory. He disguises his voice with a nasally, Urkel-adjacent delivery that undercuts the menace.
Josie Totah (Moxie) is fine as a vapid influencer Arthur kidnaps, though the acting stumbles almost as frequently as the character does. Aaron Holliday (Cocaine Bear) brings welcome energy as Margot’s roommate Ryan. However, the script leans too hard on making its lone gay character the voice of reason who pays a price in Margot’s place. Jermaine Fowler (Coming 2 America) strikes a good balance of levity and authority as her boss.
Then there’s Charli XCX and her two or three brief scenes. She’s barely in the film and fails to make much of an impression. This was shot before the singer decided to go into movie-star mode, and it shows. The performance is noncommittal, a far cry from what she’s delivered in The Moment and Erupcja. To be fair, the role is underwritten to the point where it seems to exist solely to put her name on the poster. Yet the film is strong enough that it doesn’t need the assist.
Scrolling Toward Something Smarter
Goldhaber has explored this digital paranoia before. Cam dissected the uncanny valley of online identity. How to Blow Up a Pipeline channeled radical conviction fueled by internet echo chambers. He applies both instincts here, and the result is a film that knows when to apply pressure and when to come up for air. He and Mazzei build genuine suspense as the hunter becomes the hunted.
Cinematographer Isaac Bauman captures the mood with precision. He balances the lurid darkness of Arthur’s web creations against the sterile fluorescence of Margot’s corporate workspace. There’s a deliberate contrast between her bland office and the vividly artistic apartment she shares with Ryan. That visual gap speaks to who Margot actually is underneath the numbness.
Gavin Brivik’s score goes where you’d expect for a film with razor-sharp edges, but it’s effective. It’s especially strong during the extended conclusion, even as the narrative bites off more than it can digest. The sound design is creepy throughout. While most of the costume work doesn’t call attention to itself, what designer Lauren Bott and contact lens designer Jessica Nelson craft for Montgomery is chilling. Editor Taylor Levy, fresh off A24’s A Different Man, blends 35mm footage with DSLR video, internet graphics, and lo-fi 16mm clips from the original Faces into a cohesive visual language.
Better Than the Algorithm Promised
It’s surprising how focused this Faces of Death update lands given its tortured path to theaters. Filming wrapped in May 2023. The project bounced between release dates and studios for years. You brace for the worst when that happens. But this feels less like a broken film and more like a business pawn caught in corporate dealings. It premiered at Beyond Fest Chicago on April 5 before its wide theatrical release on April 10, marking IFC’s widest release to date.
This narrative update to pseudo-doc Faces of Death is better than first glance suggests. Considerably better than those early trailers indicated. It’s not all gore and carnage. Far from the repulsive torture porn some might expect. There is genuine thinking happening here about what the internet has done to our relationship with violence. About the corporate machinery that profits from our fixation. About the invisible workers who absorb the worst of it so we don’t have to.
Those messages were conceived years ago for an audience that has since grown deeper into this online environment. That gives them a slightly weathered quality. The film becomes more conventional as it nears its conclusion, coloring inside the lines with bold permanent markers. But it brings out something feral in Ferreira. And it asks a question worth sitting with: you clicked, you watched, and now you can’t un-see it. Whose fault is that?
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